Part 2: In The Lowlands, or Alex Delivers Pizza

A few months ago I posted the first entry into what will be a running "behind the music" like accounting of all the songs from the band's first album "An Office Job In a Time of War". Since that time a lot has happened, most significantly there was a new member added to the band family by way of my wife and band lead singer Julie.

Little Ireland is doing well now, though I have not had a decent night's sleep in over a month and it's starting to take it's toll. The zombified state that I'm in is useful for such activities as writing but hopeless for things such as driving or doing my taxes. (Long live art!) But enough about me, it's all about the songs from here out. I'll be going from the first song on the album to the last, one per week. I love hearing about the background of a song. For me it opens it up in a way that I can't always explain, but I know that I'm more likely to connect with the song, and that is my hope here. When I'm finished with the songs from our first album (roughly ten weeks from now) I'll start on the ones from our forthcoming second album "What Do You Want" that is due out at the end of the summer.

So on to song number one: In The "Lowlands":

This song was written at a stoplight. I can tell you exactly which one, Belfast Maine, corner of Rt. 52 and Rt. 1.

I t was the winter of 2000 and I had just dropped out of college. The reasons were all the usual suspects, a breakup, debt from poor financial decisions and a general legarthy that I felt the first moment I stepped on campus as a freshman. (You are blessed if you have always known what you wanted to do with your life) But, that was only part of the equation. I had also experienced some highs in the previous years. I had been blessed to be able to do some traveling and had seen the Great Pyramids in Egypt, been stuck in the desert in China, ascended the Eiffel Tower and kissed the Blarney Stone in Ireland. I had also run a college newspaper's music section. (A dream job where I received tons of free music each week) It was a whirlwind time, the kind that I wish everybody could be blessed to experience. I made good friends that I still love to this day and I have memories that I will cherish forever. Those times are what made the times that followed so hard to come to terms with. (I believe that the psychological term is dissonance)

When the whirlwind ended (and the money ran dry) I dropped out of school while my good friends were going on to graduation, marriage, real jobs while I had moved home to Maine in the dead of winter. (Thanks for grace and patience Mom and Dad)

Rural Maine is not an easy place to find employment in the winter time, so I worked a series of odd jobs and delivered pizza to try to pay off the debt I had amassed from college loans and a foolish car purchase. (I am perhaps the only person to deliver pizza in a beautiful black Saab)

There were two constants in my life during this time, my family and my church. I'm not sure how I would have coped without these people. I was on my way to Church one Sunday night when I was reflecting on the crazy duality of my recent life, the highs and lows, the good times and the bad, when a lyric popped into my head at that red light...

"In the lowlands, my lips will praise you, and on the mountains I'll raise my hands."

When I got to church, I grabbed a guitar from the stage and with the three chords I knew I wrote the whole song in five minutes before the service. This was my first song. I was so proud of myself that I played it for a friend after the service and he said "you wrote that?" I didn't know whether to be offended or complimented.

I wish songs always came this easy. Sometimes they come like this, but most times its a slow, exacting process. You take an idea and try to work at it. The key for me is to not let an idea go. I try to write down an idea immediately so as not to lose it.

Here is the big thought behind the song: I want to praise the Lord when things are going well, and I want to praise Him when things get tough, whether through my own doing (as in dropping out of college) or if they are mysterious things such as illness or tragedy. God sends the rain and He can withhold it. I don't want to be a fair-weather follower of the Lord. He has sent His son to take away my sins and give me life "to the full" and I want to be the sort of man who trusts Him when the well runs dry.

The Bible says that the Lord is our father, and in the same way that I want my daughters to trust me that I have their best interests at heart when I do something they don't understand right away, I want to trust God that He sees things that I do not. There is a lot of bad theology out there about why the Lord lets the tough times come. This bad thinking is nothing new; in fact it goes all the way back to one of the first recorded stories in all of history, the Biblical book of Job. I want to break out of this thinking, and be faithful to my Heavenly father.

Thanks for reading, next week song two on the album, "I Think I'm Gonna' Go". Feel free to read the archives if you feel so lead.

It's good for migrants to come together.

See you next week.

Alex Caldwell (My Migrant Soul)

My Migrant Soul, A Band History

When I was seventeen I read these words…

"It’s pretty much the same everywhere you go. You can sense it in the air. From the reserved towns built on the steaming red clay of Georgia – to the toppling ruins and drug scarred streets of Detroit – to the chaotic, bustling, elevated trains of Chicago – to the teeming, angry alienated misery of the Desire projects of New Orleans – to the opulent, reclusive estates of the Hollywood Hills. In the hearts of people across the country and around the world lies a desperation and emptiness that knows nothing about race, gender, class or language. The heart is the one place from where we can all speak. It aches with the unspeakable hunger and incessant whisper down in its core, that “something” is missing. What it is, is what remains unspeakable."

I was sitting in the back of my red pickup truck, holding an album in my lap that I had recently bought. I had removed the album insert and was reading the liner notes. These first seven sentences set off a bell in my head as I read them over and over again. It was here that I first realized that music can speak to that lonely, haunted place, inside each of us. You know the place. It has its own particular voice and needs. It’s that voice that speaks so loudly, saying that things are not the way they are supposed to be, that we are not home yet. You can do your best to ignore the voice (we have created a whole industry in this country to try to escape it), to drown it in drink, sounds, sights, and thrills. But in the late hours of the night, it’s there, calling out, “There has got to be more!”

Forget all the religious junk that exists in our culture, all the trappings, all the bad history. Can you honestly say that you feel like things are as they should be? Does the course the world has taken for so long now seem logical? Don’t you hear it, that still, small voice, that seems to say “There’s got to be more… more than the rat race, more than saving for retirement, more than that next high, be it legal or illegal. More, more, there has got to be more!”

There is a verse in the Christian scriptures that captures perfectly this feeling I have had deep down in my soul for so long now. It comes from the book of Hebrews, chapter eleven, verse three. “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth.” Often I feel like these men of faith did in this verse. (And not always for the faith part)

I feel like I’m a stranger in this world, a migrant soul wandering around a landscape where everything is foreign and unknown, trying to make sense of a world out of focus. In order to keep going, I have to believe that there is a land waiting for me, somewhere beyond the blue, where everything will make sense, where I will be known and will have understanding. But that conversation is for another day…

That album, by the way, was “Blister Soul” by the Vigilantes of Love. The liner notes were written by rock critic, Thom Jurek. A few nights before reading the above mentioned quote, I had gone to my first solo concert in the far-away city of Portland, Main, to see the late, great, Rich Mullins. Outside the auditorium there was a representative for the now defunct Fingerprint Records. He was a smooth talker (aren’t all record company folks). When I walked into the auditorium a few minutes later, I had the Vigilantes of Love record and several other CDs in my school backpack, not knowing the significance that one of them would play on the rest of my life. On the long trip home I listened to the VOL album, but didn’t “get it”. It wasn’t the straight forward, plainspoken stuff that I usually listened to, so I took a pass on it for a while.

Then, a few days later, sitting in my truck in the back fields of the camp where I worked, I pulled out the album for a friend of mine to listen to. We sat in the back, looked at the stars, and let the music play. I pulled out the CD cover and read away, and that was that. Or, that was the beginning…

I have had, since I could remember, a torrid love affair with music. I inherited this love affair from my parents. My father (who passed away when I was two years old) once traded some blue jeans for a stack of records in Argentina, on his way to the Antarctic during a stint in the Coast Guard. He listened to that stack of records over and over again while watching the penguins go by his window as he manned his research station. He loved the song “Daniel” by Elton John so much that my mother gave that name as a middle name to my half brother (born many years later) as a tribute. My grandmother was a concert, radio and nightclub pianist in depression era Miami Beach, playing to the mobsters and bankers on holiday. My sister studied music education in college and my two year old daughter (who was named after a song by the band Caedman’s Call) can sing the chorus of “Old MacDonald” and the first few notes of “Frère Jaques".

I met my wife playing music. She was singing back-up in my church’s “band” and I was attempting to play bass guitar. (Just having started playing two weeks before) She was beautiful, and wearing a great green scarf that made her look like a movie star from the 40’s. (Ingrid Bergman comes to mind) That night I could not hit a single note right, I was too busy staring across the circle of musicians.

She sings for my band now. Her voice makes the words and notes I write come to haunted, beautiful life. She makes me want to marry her all over again when I listen to her go to work. Our band name is “My Migrant Soul” and we just fulfilled a life-long dream by putting out our first record “An Office Job In A Time Of War.” Welcome to our website.

In the next few weeks I’m going to introduce songs off of our records in the same sort of way I introduced myself and the band here. We are hard at work on our third album, so in the near future I’ll be writing about those songs as well. Check back next week for the next installment, (Sept 23rd) and while I have you on the line, feel free to check out our albums from the links on the side of this page.

Thanks folks. It’s good for migrants to come together,

Alex Caldwell (My Migrant Soul)

http://www.myspace.com/mymigrantsoul